Read Online Bookscout by John Dunning - Free Book Online Page A

never enough money: The first of the month was coming and the rent was due, and I was in one of those low ebbs when the best you can find is a thirtieth printing of Your Erroneous Zones and a waterstained Dr. Atkins. I was in grave danger of buying bad books just to be buying something, anything. In a north Denver thrift store was a copy of Shaw’s career-capping story collection, Five Decades. The price was right, 69-cents, but it was a book club edition and everyone knows you can’t sell book club fiction. I fondled it and finally put it back.
    A week later it was still there. It must be fate, I thought, and I bought the damned book and took it out to the car feeling like a fool. But when I thumbed it, $200 cash fell out in my lap.
    I’ll always remember what I thought then. You know, this isn’t a bad way to make a living.
    And it’s still a pretty good way.
    John Dunning
    Denver, Colorado
    January, 1998

BOOKSCOUT
    H IS NAME WAS JOEL BEER , but even that was partly made up. Often he felt like a character on manuscript paper, like someone he himself had made up long ago. In a sense, of course, that was true. There was no Joel Beer. Even this time and place were imaginary; the people, himself included, were like toys shoved hither and yon by some giant author beyond the clouds. On a rainy day, it was possible to imagine the thunder as the tapping of giant typewriter keys. Even the city was unreal. Just because it was called Denver, Colorado, and the encyclopedias said it had been here for a long time, that didn’t make it so. In the world an author creates, things leap full-blown to life as needed. If a character needs tradition, the author creates it out of whole cloth. He makes up something called Encyclopedia Americana and puts Volume Eight in his character’s hands. “Denver,” he reads, “a city in Colorado, capitol of the state coextensive with Denver County.” And on and on until he’s convinced. The author moves his character out of the Denver Public Library and there, a block away, is the gold-domed statehouse. The proof is all around, changeless and ever-changing, and yet, in his sixtieth year, Joel Beer was less than ever convinced about the reality of life. Today, as the city lay in the embrace of late autumn, even the man on the radio, reading wire copy about the deadly serious friction between the United States and the Soviet Union, seemed like a voice from a comic strip.
    The radio, after a two-year silence, had begun playing again just last spring. The car had hit a vicious chuckhole and suddenly the radio boomed out of nowhere. “I’ll be damned,” Joel had muttered with pleasure. “It’s gonna be a good day.” And it had; he still remembered it. He had scouted the east side, hitting all the thrift stores from Broadway to Peoria Street. He had turned up some nuggets; not diamonds, not even rubies, but a few good garnets. There was a first edition Nelson Algren, the best book he’d found in four months. Would that it were one of the early ones, Never Come Morning, say, or, please God, Somebody in Boots. But even A Walk on the Wild Side was good enough to cover expenses and a few meals. It was a $50 book to collectors. Mark Ramsey, the book dealer on East Colfax, could get that for it in this condition without much trouble, and that meant at least $15 to Joel. And that was before his other books were bought and tallied. Sometimes Ramsey surprised him: sometimes he’d pick out a dog that nobody’d ever heard of and pay plenty for it. All depended on who wanted it and how much. Ramsey was always fair to him—at least, Joel had never caught him being otherwise. Ramsey appreciated him; he knew Joel understood books and he paid well for that expertise. And that day, the day of the radio chuckhole, Ramsey had given him $40 cash. Twenty for the Algren and four to five for each of four other items. His other books, a round dozen, he’d sold off to dealers of less class for a buck a piece. They